Beware the Kitchen Knife, Especially if Made of Ice
by Chyme for the Rhyme
Summary: To be a water-bender, you must learn to push and pull. But to be a Water Tribe woman, you must learn not to crash against the shore.
Kanna lived in a cocoon. Nobody else could see it or feel it, but she knew it was there. It was what prevented her from growing cold every time her mother corrected her hold on the kitchen knife, or every time Pakku's eyes raked across her face while his tongue forgot to say her name.

'Don't hold it like a weapon' she remembered her mother chiding her, 'gently, _gently_ ; you're slicing too hard. A woman should move like her bones are made of glass.'

It was the same with Pakku. There was a cluck in his voice, hoarser than any arctic hen as his tongue flicked against his teeth.

You look like you want to thrust an icy javelin right into my heart,' he said. 'Careful now; it's not an attractive look.'

But the words couldn't touch her. Not while there was still a cocoon wrapped around her heart. So one night, Kanna stepped into a boat, letting her robes slap against her ankle instead of lifting them to flirt with the air. And it turned out her bones weren't made of glass after all, for there was a creak as she pressed her weight against the wood. But still, her mother's lessons held merit and she pressed herself down low, carefully, like her skin was meant to perch and not rest within the hollow of the boat.

For while she could not touch the water with her breath, nor turn it to ice, not even to thrust a javelin into anyone's heart, others could. Others who might see her and stop her.

So Kanna dipped her oar into the canal and then yanked it out furiously as she turned south. Perhaps down there, she would find something to help thaw her cocoon.

* * *

Kya lived in a place where doors were always open and food was always scarce. But she knew, even if no one spoke it, that there was always a hand-out to be shared, some fragile scrap of turtle-seal jerky that a neighbour was willing to gift her with, if only she looked up and held out her palm.

Her mother always sniffed. 'Beauty won't get you everything, my girl. Learn to fend for yourself.'

But oh, couldn't her mother tell that was exactly what she was doing? For it was already winning her friends and more. And Hakoda was kind, always kind, as he pushed penguin thigh into her hand, closing her fingers over the blood-soaked bone with a push from his fist. He would use the same, careful shove when dropping a betrothal necklace into her waiting hand, days later. But this time, he sought her eyes as his hand opened slightly, fingers loosening to reach out and form a knot between the gaps with her own. It was stupid and silly, to make such a pattern with their skin, especially without their gloves to cushion them from frostbite. But oh, it was also hopelessly brave. She could have said 'no', after all.

'I'm helpless against you,' Hakoda confessed. 'Everything about you, your eyes, your skin; they make me feel as though I'm walking into the tundra.'

Kya enjoyed the thought of being dangerous like that. She couldn't hold a spear or slice a knife through veins, no matter how Hakoda or her mother tried to teach her. She found the weight of each action too heavy for her to hold.

But Hakoda's hand; that, she thought, she could support with her own.

* * *

Katara lived in a world gone to war. For years it encompassed her, made the sky run dark with soot before later, setting her dreams alight with fire and screams. The darkness was her enemy, the charred crisp of it settling into the night, basking the steel hulls of fire nation ship with shadows in the same way it had played with her mother's body, charring her beauty until it fell from the bone.

And then later, it became her friend. It covered her, coated her motion and her clothes as she escaped into the night with a runaway prince at her side, drawing water and ice with her fingers wherever she stepped. She leapt out, thumped across the steel coat of the fire nation ship, and the noise did not frighten her, could not scare her or the soldiers she saw in her way, no, _she_ scared _them_.

Katara did not need a knife to hold, did not need her breath to catch, she was not with a man she loved and there was no one here she needed to run from. Just a monster she needed to run to.

And later, when she stared him down, made water into knives, carved ice into spears, and launched them like javelins, she remembered how he had yelled at her, told her to get out, to run away.

She looked at him, at the bones beneath his knees, the ones which would not push him up away from the ground and remembered how her mother had held herself down in a similar pose years before. It made her angry to see him bow, made her rage to think that maybe after she had abandoned her, her mother might have done the same.

'I just can't do it', she said finally and walked away. And wondered bitterly, if her grandmother and mother had ever thought the same, back when they were confronted with the monsters in their lives.


End file.
